In this note I argue that the desirability of fiscal policy in response to the current crisis depends on whether one views the current crisis as a temporary deviation from a unique equilibrium or as a bad equilibrium out of multiple equilibria. The paper presents a simple Diamond (1982) type of...

In this paper we derive a structural measure for labor market density based on the Ellison and Glasear (1997) "Index for industry concentration". This labor market density measure serves as a proxy for the number of workers that can reach a certain work area within a reasonal amount of traveling...

We examine wage competition in a model where identical workers choose the number of jobs to apply for and identical firms simultaneously post a wage. The Nash equilibrium of this game exhibits the following properties: (i) an equilibrium where workers apply for just one job exhibits unemployment...

We present a structural framework for the evaluation of public policies intended to increase job search intensity. Most of the literature defines search intensity as a scalar that influences the arrival rate of job offers; here we treat it as the number of job applications that workers send out....

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a network. Frictions arise because workers typically do not know where other workers apply to and firms do not know which candidates other firms consider. The first coordination friction affects network formation, while the second...

In this paper, we present a directed search model of the housing market. The pricing mechanism we analyze reflects the way houses are bought and sold in the United States. Our model is consistent with the observation that houses are sometimes sold above, sometimes below and sometimes at the...

This paper shows that we can normalize job and worker characteristics so that, without frictions,

Do people move to cities because of marriage market considerations? In cities

We show how small initial wealth differences between low skilled black and white workers can generate large differences in their labor-market outcomes. This even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against blacks or exogenous differences in the distance to jobs. Because of the...

This discussion paper has resulted in an article in 'Economica', 2002, 69(273), 21-40.